All About SharePoint is a blog about SharePoint, InfoPath and related technologies. It was started in 2005 and has good readership in many countries. It covers SharePoint 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016 and Office 365. You can read articles, tips, tutorials and news. It has code samples and complete applications as well.

Passthrough: the authentication mode quite literally passes credentials through from the front end (sp) to the back end (lob app identified via the BDC)

Reverttoself: this mode reverts whatever impersonation might be done by IIS and authenticate against the BDC app using the identity of the IIS app pool itself.

SSO: uses the sso subsystem for authentication to BDC

rdbCredentials: it’s SSL

(Note: These notes were taken while blogging live. Please ignore any typos you may find. Thanks)
Personal Note: If you want to learn more about BDC and integrating line of business applications with SharePoint, read the following wrox blox:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0026A6ATW

SharePoint Saturday Philly
Session: Search for SharePoint 2010 and FAST ESP by Natalya Voskresenskaya
Natalya is a SharePoint MVP. She speaks about SharePoint Search and ESP Fast today.
Agenda
Enterprise Search Value
Architectural Changes
FAST search linguistic features
Lemmatization
Entity Extraction and Synonyms
Structural Analysis
Dictionaries
New Search experience
Configure, extend, create new
Enterprise Search Value
What’s the true value in Enterprise search?
Impose multiple layers of information architecture on top of structured and unstructured content. It helps you build a 360 degrees view of what’s happening in the company. File shares, hard drives are full of information but no one knows what’s in there. People don’t think about organizing information. People should organize the information. That’s where taxonomy comes in. We replicate information. Companies replicate information. If there is really no easy access to information then you don’t have that information. The problem is that all the documents have to be tagged with the information. This is called meta tagging.
SharePoint Search 2007
Problem with SharePoint Search! It ‘s locked. You can index data from all custom databases but you cannot impose your business rules on top of the business engine. SharePoint has its indexing engine but it is used only for people search.
FAST Search extends SharePoint server
Advantages:
High availability!
Why new search is so great? Why 2007 search was failing so badly? Important part in search engine is preprocessing. When document is normalized, all characters are normalized to the language in which they are searchable. Documents should be properly index to be searched.
Pre-processing
Doc id
Text normalization
Processing
All the magic stuff
Post –processing
Signals to indexer
Common Scenario
Search string: “looking for SP architect”
Query: “looking” and “sp” and “architect”
First result: “set of 4 dunlop sp sport 6000 tires ….”
Search engines remove noise words from the sentences.
Contextual insight
Contextual insight annotates the scope with entity metadata by extracting all the entities it can find to provide the answers. FAST understands paragraphs, addresses, names, company names, phone numbers. It also has natural language processing. Main thing is contextual support. It’s amazing.
Linguistics
Determine the language
Tokenization and normalization
Spelling and spelling variation
Anti-phrasing and stop words
Synonyms, acronyms
Pronunciation
Entity extraction
Lemmatization
Mapping of the word to its base form and base form variation. “Walk” is the base form of word “walking”. And hence this matches in both stemming and lemmatization.
Lemmatization dictionaries
Dictionaries
Nouns
Adjectives
Verbs
Blacklist
Dictionaries in SP 2010
Now you can create your own dictionaries. In SP 2010 you can do it through the UI.
Notes/Interesting topics and points

Relevance tuning

Proximity boosts

Context boosts

Boosts are based on the contexts. If information is found in the meta data then the boosting of the document goes up.

Now we can extend search capabilities

Now you can use BCS (Business Connectivity Suite) in SP 2010. No need to create ADF files! BDC was difficult to use. Searching external data in SP 2010 is easy.

SharePoint Saturday Philly
Session: Findability, Putability, and taxonomy building in SharePoint 2010 by Bill English
Fig 1: Bill English starting his session
What is Putability
Definition: The quality of putting content in the correct location with the correct metadata.
The degree to which we put quality information into our information management system
Truths: What goes in, must come out: garbage in, garbage out
What is findability
Definition: the quality of being locatable or navigable
The degree to which objects are easy
Putablity, findability and technology
Most are clueless when it comes to thinking about how information should go into SharePoint
Fig 2: Full room during Bill English’s session
Notes/Interesting points

Great architecture will save your company significant monies through increased efficiencies.

What is e-discovery?
Dispute -> file civil claim -> discovery -> trial or settlement
Discovery is the exchange of evidence between the parties
MMS – in a nutshell

content type distribution system

enables enterprise-wide CT usage

retains local control

pull technology

Enterprise taxonomy development
Problem: users don’t want to take the time to tag information
(Solution) MMS feature: force metadata assignments via closed lists and DIP
Problem: users don’t know what metadata to select
(Solution) MMS feature: users can select from a set of choices in a choice list
The MMS is about putability, not findability
(Note: This is live blogging. You may find typos and mistakes. Please ignore the mistakes. Thanks.)
Personal Note: You can read more about MMS here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424403(office.14).aspx

This project type cannot be sandboxed because requirements exceed limitation of sandboxing.

All files are inside MyWebpart folder.

VS 2010 creates a package for you. Package is for one project. It sounds limiting but it is not. You can use feature from on one project in another project. It sounds complicated. Copying feature to another project will link it. It will not create a new copy. You can share the elements of one web part package with other projects. You also have feature designer.

You can decide where to deploy the web part, for example, on the front end server.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

AC has posted a fantastic article today. He talks about the hardware he uses for SharePoint 2010 development. Here is the link:
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2009/11/03/doing-sharepoint-2010-development-ndash-whatrsquos-in-your-rig.aspx
Article has some fine suggestions about the hardware that you can use and increase your development speed. These are not mandatory requirements by the way. You can use a low configuration laptop to do SharePoint 2010 development but that's the primary difference between a novice and an expert. If you just want to experience SharePoint 2010 (no development), you can run it on a 32 bit system as well using virtualization. One of my SharePoint 2010 installations run on a 32 bit system. Following is the configuration I use for 32 bit system:
Lenovo T61 (IBM ThinkPad)
OS: Vista 32 bit
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 @2.40 GHz 2.40 GHz
RAM: 4 GB (32 bit systems use only 3 GB)
HDD: 160 GB Single Partition
Virtualization:
VMWare Workstation 7
Windows Server 2008 R2
This is the minimum configuration I believe that you need to run SharePoint 2010 :). You can increase the performance by adding a SSD (as suggested by AC) and/or increasing the RAM. For my daily use, I use a 64 bit system for SharePoint development. My 64 bit configuration is as following:
HP laptop
7200 RPM HDD
8 GB RAM
Quad Core Processor